Two-thirds of all email blocked based on sender reputation

St. Bernard Software’s LivePrism filtering solution blocked two-thirds of its customers’ incoming email in July based solely on sender reputation without having to analyze the message content. This provides an increased level of protection against evolving threats such as image spam and PDF spam.

In total, St. Bernard blocked 89 per cent of customers’ incoming email for being spam or virus infected. St. Bernard’s partner Commtouch released its ‘Email Threats Trend Report’ for the second quarter of 2007, based on the company’s real-time analysis of billions of e-mail messages globally each week. Highlights of this report included:

— Spam with PDF attachments emerged as spammers’ newest technique for avoiding detection at the end of the second quarter of 2007.
— During one massive attack, PDF-spam comprised 10-15 per cent of global spam messages during a 24-hour period, increasing overall global spam traffic by 30-40 per cent.

“The popularity and frequent use of PDFs for legitimate business communications makes it difficult for traditional spam filters to effectively block these messages,” said Andrew Lochart, vice president of marketing at St. Bernard.